News

VKernel Chargeback Virtual Appliance Gets VMWare Certification

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel Corporation announced (PDF) today that the company has joined the VMware Certified Virtual Appliance Program. The company also notes the VKernel Chargeback Virtual Appliance is currently the only available VMware-certified virtual appliance for chargeback and cost visibility.

Virtual appliances are pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. Customers can easily install and deploy these pre-integrated solution stacks. This speeds up time-to-value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

The virtual appliance measures CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization in VMware virtualized environments, stores the information and generates chargeback and cost visibility reports. This helps customers track and allocate expenses to individual departments or users based on actual resource consumption.

“VKernel’s new Chargeback Virtual Appliance offers customers an easy way to tackle the complex yet essential task of accurately accounting for resource consumption and assigning its associated costs,” said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. “VMware virtual appliances greatly simplify how customers deploy and manage their business-critical software applications. We welcome VKernel’s contribution to the more than 700 virtual appliances available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.”

[Source: VMBlog]

Marathon Technologies Releases everRun Software

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

We’ve covered the beta launch of Marathon Technologies’ everRun software a little over a month ago, and now the company has officially released the product.

Customers can download a free 15-day trial of everRun VM. The latest version of Citrix XenServer 4.1 is also available as a trial edition. everRun VM suggested retail pricing is $2000 per server (perpetual license) for customers that have Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. everRun VM with Citrix XenServer 4.1 Enterprise Edition is $4500 per server for a perpetual license.

Absolute Performance Releases System Shepherd 5.0

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Absolute Performance yesterday announced the availability of System Shepherd version 5.0, performance management software SaaS applications. System Shepherd 5.0 brings the ability to instrument and manage application software operating in VMware, Xen, Hyper-V and Parallels virtualized environments.

The 5.0 release of System Shepherd adds the ability to look deep into the virtualization software hypervisor, giving insight into the performance of multiple applications, web servers, databases and operating systems running across a single or multiple virtual machines. System Shepherd quantifies the resource utilization of all the software operating within the virtualized environment, easing performance tuning and resource management of virtualized applications and software. System Shepherd supports VMware ESX hypervisor and will expand support to Parallels, Xen and Hyper-V in the coming months.
System Shepherd 5.0 is the foundation of Absolute’s suite of On Demand software solutions for managing software performance in software-as-a-service delivered applications, content and enterprise solutions. Version 5.0 brings a fully customizable dashboard based on the flexible, iGoogle-style web-based user interface.

Everything is configured through System Shepherd’s web interface, cutting installation time down to less than a day, even hours, as compared to the weeks, months and sometimes years to install on-premise enterprise management systems.

[Source: SYS-CON]

Mosaic Technology Launches V-Accelerate

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Mosaic Technology today announced V-Accelerate, a virtualization program to help companies effectively and rapidly implement data center virtualization. V-Accelerate combines planning, design, component acquisition, and implementation, using VMware as a foundation.

According to the press release, V-Accelerate leverages Mosaic’s experience in VMware though Certified VMware Professionals. It also takes advantage of Mosaic’s 12-plus years of infrastructure expertise with leading technologies in storage, backup/recovery, data deduplication, and data management.

V-Accelerate includes:

Assessment – structured capacity planning to maximize VM scheme
Configuration – detailed infrastructure analysis and recommendations based on strategic, business, and budget considerations.
Implementation – Fast track deployment with substantial knowledge transfer

“Virtualization is more than server consolidation,” said Don Basler, Director of Marketing at Mosaic. “Our experience shows us that while many companies initially are attracted to the benefits of server consolidation, they quickly discover that a variety of infrastructure and data management issues need to be considered.”

“V-Accelerate manages those issues. We look at the total picture — physical and logical server configurations, storage virtualization, backup and recovery, replication, and overall VM management. In the end we save our customers time, effort and money.”

[Source: PRWeb]

IGEL Delivers Broad Range of Thin Clients With Citrix XenDesktop Support

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IGEL Technology, the German company which bills itself as the world’s third largest thin client vendor, today announced the broadest range of thin client models supporting the Citrix XenDesktop virtualization standard. With all of its 22 models now supporting Citrix XenDesktop, IGEL’s digital services approach allows organizations “to offer the best user experience combined with robust desktop resilience and powerful remote management”.

The IGEL Technology range includes traditional desktop designs, PC upgrade cards, 17? and 19? LCD integrated units, wireless tablets and quad screen units.

“The arguments for virtualizing PCs are becoming overwhelming,” said Dirk Dördelmann, technical director, IGEL Technology. “Applications can now be migrated to the data center without compatibility issues. The access device choice is so broad that organizations can place them almost anywhere, and the process of deployment is no more complex than plugging in a telephone. IGEL offers the end user a thin client experience that is just like a PC but without the hassles, and we are excited to now offer this capability in conjunction with our long-term partner Citrix.”

IGEL Technology’s range of Citrix XenDesktop compatible thin clients will be on display at the upcoming Citrix Synergy event in Houston, Texas from May 20-23, 2008; and the Citrix iForum08 event in Edinburgh, Scotland, from June 9-11, 2008.

[Source: Pressemeldungen.at]

Payment Card Industry Lack Virtualization-Specific Requirements For Security Audits

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Good catch by Eric Siebert over at the Server Virtualization Blog: the Payment Card Industry’s data security standards (PCI DSS), requirements set forth by the major credit card players – Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover in order to protect credit card data, apparently don’t have any virtualization-specific requirements put into practice so far.

“Having just survived another annual PCI compliance audit, I was again surprised that the strict standards for securing servers that must be followed contain nothing specific concerning virtual hosts and networks. Our auditor focused on guest virtual machines (VMs), ensuring they had up-to-date patches, locked-down security settings and current anti-virus definitions. But ironically, the host server that the virtual machines were running on went completely ignored. If the host server was compromised, it wouldn’t matter how secure the VMs were because they could be easily accessed. Host servers should always be securely locked down to protect the VMs which are running on them.”

Read the rest of the blog post here.